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Potted Ox-tongue

Boiled ox tongue minced and spiced with mace, nutmeg, cloves, cayenne, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Potted Ox-tongue

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tongue

  1. Boil the ox tongue until tender.

  2. The next day, cut the desired amount for potting from the tongue.

  3. Trim off the skin and rind, then mince the meat very small.

Make the potted meat

  1. Pound the minced meat with 4 oz of butter for each pound of tongue.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of mace, ½ teaspoon of nutmeg, ½ teaspoon of cloves, and ¼ teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

  3. Mix well and taste; add more spices if needed.

  4. For firmness, mix in a few ounces of well-roasted meat, such as turkey or chicken.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ox tongue
Provides the main meat body that is minced and bound into the potted mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the spices and giving the potted meat a smooth texture.

The step that matters

Mix well and taste; add more spices if needed.. Spices like mace, nutmeg, cloves and cayenne are easy to under- or over-dose, and their flavour spreads unevenly through dense meat unless thoroughly mixed. Tasting before adding more lets the cook adjust once the flavour has blended.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, nutmeg, clove, pepper):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, clove, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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